A growing number of community bank leaders are finally expressing a willingness to sell.

The long-awaited sea change, evident in a KPMG survey of 105 CEOs and other senior executives at banks with $1 billion to $20 billion of assets, suggests that the pace of dealmaking will pick up this year, perhaps significantly.

A quarter of the respondents say they expect to sell in 2014. (In a similar survey conducted a year earlier, when the price expectations of buyers and sellers were relatively divergent, only 15 percent of respondents planned to sell within a two-year time frame.) The percentage of respondents who expect to be acquirers has held steady at about 40 percent.

The latest results, based on responses gathered in October, indicate that the gap between buyers and sellers has started to close, says John Depman, KPMG's national leader of regional and community banking.

"There has been a lot of discussion about M&A and all of the reasons it could happen," he says. "Part of the disconnect" so far between the predictions of significant consolidation and the pace of the dealmaking "has been that everyone wanted to be a buyer and there were not enough sellers."

But now, improved asset quality is giving potential sellers a chance to command a better price, while recent increases in stock prices have given potential buyers a stronger currency for deals.

The continuing buildup of regulatory pressures and management fatigue also may be contributing to the change in perspectives on selling. More than 75 percent of the survey respondents say banks must reach $1 billion of assets to stay independent, and nearly a third say regulatory changes are important drivers of deals.

Respondents to the KPMG survey say that a seller's customer base is the most important criterion for making an offer.

Most buyers likely will select targets with customers similar to their own, since they understand those segments already. But there's also increased interest in diversifying, making some buyers interested in banks that serve other customer groups or offer different products, Depman says.

For example, "we've seen mutual thrifts that convert and want to get away from their traditional residential mortgage base to include commercial loans," Depman says. "That's a different reason to get into M&A."

Expect banks to pull back on energy lending in the near term, as regulators step up their scrutiny of oil loans and bankers approach the business with a "different attitude," says Mariner Kemper, chairman and chief executive at UMB Financial in Kansas City, Mo.

The post-election rise in stock prices has been a boon for investors, but it is also causing notable changes for financial institutions. Here are a number of ways that the rally can help  and hurt  the banking industry.

It's the time of year to give thanks, and for bankers some things to be grateful for include rising stock prices, a brightening M&A outlook and, most notably, the potential for regulatory relief under President-elect Donald Trump. Here is a list of developments the industry might be celebrating this Thanksgiving holiday.

Bankers are anxiously waiting to see who President-elect Donald Trump will pick as the next Treasury secretary. Several prominent names have been floated for the job, though with every passing day, a new possible choice seems to pop up. Following is a look at the current crop of candidates and their chances.

Mobile phones are only going to become a bigger part of how banks interact with their customers, so several institutions are looking to enhance that experience. They are focusing on better ways of opening accounts, verifying identities, interacting with customers and offering new services and features. Here are some of the improvements announced this year.

This year federal and state regulators have started to pay closer attention to the rapidly evolving online-lending sector  particularly online small-business lending. What follows is a look at eight key players in the debate over how to regulate this emerging industry.